Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor: The 2000 Foot Trench
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Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor:
"The 2000 Foot Trench" 

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2000 Foot trench servers as a radio version of Army KP (Kitchen Patrol) duty

After things were running smoothly, we decided to try a 2000 foot long underground wire, in line with the sea wires, but pointing in the opposite direction. This required the digging of a narrow trench, 7 feet deep and 2000 feet long. By this time we had 100 operators, a marine guard and various other ratings on the station. When we had some infractions of discipline, most of them, fortunately, rather minor infractions, I would hold a deck court and sentence the unlucky,- personnel to dig so many days on the trench. Still the trench proceeded very slowly. Thereafter, instead of sentencing a man to so many days on the trench, I designated so many feet the sooner they dug it, the sooner the sentence was over and they were back on regular duty with their usual privileges. Thereafter the trench was very rapidly completed.

Had we known what we knew shortly afterwards about the action of these buried wires, we wouldn't have dug this trench. The whole advantage of the buried wire lies in its directivity and its lack of resonance, but since the trench wire, of necessity, pointed in the wrong direction for the signals in which we were primarily interested, it gave very poor results on European copy. It was pretty fair for making copy from San Diego, but this was only test work and not a regular job.
Page updated December 30, 2003  page created September 02, 2000

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